


Floating in a Blue Lagoon

by A_Diamond



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blow Jobs, Canon Disabled Character, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Smut, Hand Jobs, Jellyfish Steve, Light BDSM, M/M, Masochist Bucky, Mermaids, Non-Human Genitalia, Sappy, Shark Bucky, Tentacles, past character injury, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 08:06:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11331783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Though Bucky and Steve have known each other since childhood, it took war and capture and recovery to put an end to their mutual pining. On their anniversary, their friends arrange to get them some time alone to celebrate.





	Floating in a Blue Lagoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sealcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sealcat/gifts).



> Thanks first of all to Sealcat, for the delightful [art](http://imgur.com/2dZHOUp) that inspired this work! I absolutely loved it on first sight, and I’m so glad I got to write a story for it.
> 
> And also to [allrealities](http://archiveofourown.org/users/allrealities)/[cyborgtopus](https://cyborgtopus.tumblr.com/) for being a fantastic, speedy, and encouraging beta!

Steve wasn’t even halfway done with his assigned patrol when Bucky found him, but Tony and Sam were only a dozen or so fathoms away in each direction. And the area around their seamount had been quiet for years, so he didn’t feel bad getting distracted. He even let himself drift away from his path, though he mostly floated in place and waited for Bucky to swim over with a few powerful swings of his tail.

“Aren’t you still supposed to be on watch?” he called when Bucky got near, but his tentacles gave away his eagerness by reaching for his lover without conscious input from Steve.

Bucky grinned and tangled his fingers with the outstretched tentacles in greeting. They wrapped around him delightedly and Steve couldn’t pretend anymore that he wasn’t happy about the visit. He reeled Bucky in—the tendrils clinging to him weren’t Steve’s strongest, but Bucky wasn’t exactly resisting—until he could take Bucky’s hands in his. The tentacles unwound, but didn’t stray far, curling up Bucky’s arms and around his back instead. Only the larger stinging arms held back, weaving themselves together behind Steve’s back to avoid any accidental contact.

“It’s fine, Thor took over. He wants us to ‘enjoy this most blessed day, the anniversary of our reunion.’” Bucky’s face flattened into an impression of the hammerhead’s solemn face, but he ruined it with a smirk. “Apparently that involves getting off duty early so I can romance you properly.”

Steve’s tentacles wrapped themselves more tightly around Bucky, particularly his left arm. The prosthetic of salvaged turtle shell and cartilage was just as much Bucky’s as his natural arm now, and he used it without thought, but it had taken him time to get there. Losing a limb in the Hydra-Kraken War had been hard on him, and being held by the hydras in a subarctic cave for months had been even harder. It would never stop amazing Steve that he’d fought his way free and come home.

It was indeed something to celebrate, and Steve would’ve loved nothing more than to be romanced. But he didn’t have a convenient tropical transplant to take over his responsibilities.

“That’s real sweet of him, but I’m still stuck here. You’re welcome to come along on the rest of my route if you want, but it’s not gonna be very interesting.”

“I’m sure I can keep myself entertained.” Gently twisting himself free of Steve’s assortment of grasps on him, he prodded Steve in the chest. “Back to work, you floatabout. Don’t just bob there like a piece of driftwood, you’ve got a very important job to do!”

Steve rolled his eyes, but let the force of Bucky’s push propel him back on course. Bucky followed, swishing his tail in time with his cheerful humming. He was up to something, Steve knew that. He’d as good as admitted he was up to something, and even besides that, he was always up to something. That was the trouble with Bucky.

Truth be told, it was also one of the things Steve loved best about him.

So he let Bucky get away with it, like he always did, and he tried not to allow his attention waver too much to the sleek body behind him. Once again, his tentacles had minds of their own and didn’t listen to him, because he felt them seeking out Bucky’s presence and brushing against his fingertips like they couldn’t get enough of his touch. Which, given that they were a part of Steve, they really couldn’t.

Despite half an hour with nothing untoward happening except for Bucky’s increasingly off-key tunes, Steve refused to be lulled into a false sense of security. He kept an eye on the kelp forest in the distance for any signs of unusual movement, but as expected, the green-brown stalks swayed naturally in the current. Not that he believed the most pressing threat at the moment was external. No, whatever terrible fate was about to befall him, it would come from the shark at his back.

“Hey, remember back when you were an ephyra, before you grew into your sting, and that pair of sea turtles tied you up in the forest over there?”

Whenever Bucky brought up one of their youthful misadventures that he considered to be Steve’s fault, which was most of them, he did so in a tone that was equal parts smug and exasperated. He always had, even back when they were still youthful, but it was only when they’d finally gotten together after the war that Steve realized he sounded the same when he was trying to goad Steve into sex.

Steve never took a lot of convincing, but it still resulted in an inappropriate tingle through his jelly when he heard it, even in the more innocent context. He tried to suppress the feeling, but if Bucky’s chuckle and the peripheral feel of prickly-rough sharkskin were any indication, his tentacles continued to give him away.

It was a lost cause, but he fought to inject some grumpiness into his voice. “Yeah, I remember. Punks took Clint’s lucky river rock, too, and threw it into a vent before I could get free.”

“Before you could get free, huh?” Bucky bumped his shoulder against Steve’s and Steve flicked him in the nose with a tentacle. Finally, they were obeying him; they never wanted to do that around Bucky. Of course, in the next moment, they were back to curling around his neck and shoulders adoringly.

“Woulda gotten myself free eventually,” he grumbled. “I got my hands loose before you found me, but they’d tied every single tentacle into a different strand of kelp! It wasn’t exactly quick work.”

“I know, I know. Took a while even with the two of us.”

When Bucky lapsed into silence, Steve glanced back. He was staring off at the forest, his smile so soft and distant that is almost looked sad.

“You all right, Buck?”

Hair swirling through the water as he turned, Bucky closed the distance between them and draped his arms over Steve’s shoulders; tentacles eagerly rushed to embrace them. His eyes were the color of waves over rocks on the Atlantic coast.

“I ever tell you that’s the first time I fell in love with you?”

Steve’s skin flushed and his tentacles shivered in pleased embarrassment. “You were just a pup.”

“Yeah, and you were barely bigger than an anemone. But you were cursing every other move, goin’ on and on about how you needed to get those bastards like you actually had a chance. And not even cause ’a what they did to you, you just didn’t like that they made your friend sad.”

“They were bullies!”

“They sure were. And you weren’t about to let them get away with it, never mind they were four times your size. You were such a tiny little thing.” Looking him over, Bucky shook his head with a wry grin. “You always said you were gonna get big, but I tell you, I never bought it until it happened.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a cynical jerk. Leave off that part, go back to telling me how in love with me you were.” A memory danced past, and Steve tightened all his grips on Bucky as he narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Hey, wait. You—” he prodded Bucky in the chest with a spare tentacle—“you said you fell in love with me that second full moon after you came home!”

Bucky pushed in, sandwiching the accusatory appendage between their chests, to distract Steve from his point with a meeting of lips that caught him by surprise. Pushing the advantage, Bucky deepened the kiss; predatory and hungry, his tongue slipped into Steve’s mouth as smoothly as Bucky himself slipped through the water.

But Steve was a predator, too, and he’d learned to fight dirty from a young age. He slipped a hand into Bucky’s hair, his fingers petting and stroking until Bucky gentled, then he tangled them in the strands and yanked hard to drag Bucky’s lips off his. He turned his head and ducked down before Bucky could react, mouthing at the sensitive flesh on the underside of Bucky’s jaw, just above his gills.

When Bucky started to struggle, Steve set his teeth right at the edge of the top slit and Bucky’s body stilled instantly—though his gills flared as he moaned, “Steve,” so high and soft it was almost a whine.

Steve eased back, pressing a tender kiss to Bucky’s fluttering gills, and softened his grip without releasing it. “You fell in love with me...” he prompted when Bucky remained silent a moment too long.

Endlessly sassy for a fishman, Bucky summoned back his sharp-toothed shark’s grin. Even though he’d won the round, it made Steve weak in the jelly to see it. Especially when the charmer followed it up with, “Beautiful, I fall in love with you every day. But I meant what I said. That was the first time. First time I looked at you and thought, well, I’m done. There’s no one who could be more perfect than this little punk of a jellyfish who doesn’t know when he’s beat.”

Steve glared and protested, “They didn’t beat me!” which made Bucky throw back his head in laughter, flashing rows of deadly sharp teeth. Steve loved to see Bucky laughing, even when it was at him.

“They absolutely did, Stevie, but that’s okay. You got bigger and tougher than all of them in the end.” Bucky raised his right hand to curl around Steve’s wrist, but he didn’t try to pull him away. He just stroked up the sensitive flesh on the underside of Steve’s forearm, squeezing when he reached the bicep. “You’re so strong, they really ought to put you to work. Hauling kelp, or building reefs, or golly, I don’t know, patrolling the border.”

Bucky’s wide, innocent eyes were such a lie. Flicking him in the nose again, Steve uncurled his fingers and tentacles and pulled back. “Yeah, yeah. Like you’re not the one distracting me. Come on, then.”

They turned away from the forest and continued along the patrol route. Bucky knew it as well as Steve did, splitting his work hours between patrol and watch, and he was a stronger swimmer; Steve was designed for drifting, though he’d worked hard to develop the arm muscles and tentacle coordination to power himself in his chosen direction. So Bucky showed off, cutting circles through the water around Steve.

It also gave him an excuse not to look at Steve when he said, soft and solemn, “After the war, it was... it had to happen again. I never stopped loving you, not really, but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same. I had to figure out if I could still love you right.”

“Buck...”

“No, listen.” They’d both stopped moving again. A gentle current floated them in the right direction, but Bucky was fixated on the shelled plates of his hand and Steve was fixated on Bucky. He didn’t talk about this much. “I know you were confident I’d get back to myself, because someone gave you starlight and jelly where there were supposed to be brains, but I really didn’t know until right before I kissed you.”

Bucky started to swim on, but Steve caught him up in an embrace from behind. “You know, most people don’t go straight from realizations of love to kissing.”

Butting his head against Steve’s chin—in the fond way he liked to do, not hard enough to hurt—Bucky complained, “Don’t you ever listen, Steve? ‘Cause I could swear I just got done tellin’ you it wasn’t straight from anything. It was years in the making. Just about the whole time, really.”

A couple of Steve’s tentacles tangled themselves into Bucky’s hair and tugged playfully. “Pining after me for years, huh?”

“Never said I had any brains, either.”

“I say neither of you have any brains, or you’d have asked me to cover for you ages ago so you could get your kinky interspecies freak on.”

Of all the people to sneak up on them in the bittersweet moment, of course it had to be Tony. Steve didn’t really mind, though. Bickering with Tony always cheered Bucky up; bickering in general cheered Bucky up, which was probably why he and Steve had always got along so well.

Sure enough, the tense set of Bucky’s spine dropped away as he craned his head to peer over Steve’s shoulder. “Maybe I was about to get my freak on right here and now you’ve ruined the mood.”

“Well thank the tides for that. No one wants to see your exibitionism in action.”

Steve made a rude gesture out of the tentacles at his back without looking at Tony, whose laughter cracked through the water behind them.

“Go on, get out of here,” he said, “you’re grossing me out.” Tony sounded more disgruntled than ever, which was a sure sign that he was trying to act like he wasn’t experiencing sincere feelings.

Drifting away from Bucky with a grin and, “Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, Tony,” Steve turned to his friend. The war had been hard on all of them, no one escaping unscathed mentally or physically, but Tony and Bucky had come out the worst for visible damage. Tony liked to pretend nothing had happened, but he rubbed at the mass of scar tissue on his chest as he watched them, and Steve understood.

Bucky coming home, Steve and Bucky getting together—it mattered to more than just them. Their friends were happy to get Bucky back, of course, and happy for the two of them in the altruistic way of friendship. But it was also personal for everyone who’d fought and lost even as they won the overall war. For all that the fighting had been over for years, healing was a slow process. Every moment that proved they could have peace and normalcy and joy again served as a reminder of why the sacrifice was worth it.

So he ignored Tony’s exaggerated protests and harmlessly pinching claws and wrapped him in a many-tentacled hug. Only Tony’s dark red, armored tail was free from the embrace, so he tried to batter Steve with it, but the rest of Steve’s tentacles just swayed away in the current his movements stirred up.

“Thank you,” he said softly. Tony stopped thrashing. “Thank you, friend.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Bucky reached out to twine his fingers with Steve’s as they left Tony behind, and of course Steve’s emotive tentacles invited themselves along. It was fine. Not like Bucky was going to complain about the tenderly possessive grip on his wrist. He liked to have as much of Steve touching him as possible at any given time, which suited Steve perfectly because he wanted the same thing. At all times.

“I don’t actually have a plan for where we’re going,” Bucky admitted once they were far enough away that Tony couldn’t overhear. “You know I woulda been fine tagging along on your rounds.”

Joyful inspiration bubbling up in his chest made Steve’s whole body feel as light as his cap. He took the lead as he promised, “I’ve got an idea, come on.”

Maybe he tugged first. Maybe Bucky did. All Steve knew was that suddenly the two of them were flipping and spinning through the water, frolicking like they were young again. They weren’t really racing, because then Steve would’ve been left behind and neither of them wanted that. Also, Bucky didn’t seem to have figured out yet where Steve was leading them. But their play held an element of competition, just as it always had.

Bucky didn’t stop laughing until Steve nudged him under a natural arch of porous stone and into a sheltered atoll. The water warmed as soon as they passed the boundary, where it was shallow enough for the sun to heat it. Everything was crystal blue in the bright sunlight, and Bucky looked even more gorgeous as it filtered down from the gently shifting surface.

It was the lagoon where they’d first met. Steve had been truly tiny and vulnerable, a little polyp of a jelly that would’ve fit in Bucky’s small hand if he hadn’t been attached to the rocks. When a shark pup showed up one day to bask in the calm waters, Steve took him for a threat and tried to warn him off by brandishing his not-yet-formidable tentacles and yelling lies about how dangerous they were.

According to Bucky, it had been downright adorable. Not what he’d been going for, but since it earned him a lifelong friend who turned into the love of his life, he took it gladly.

The atoll had also been the site of their first coming together, long delayed and yet as inevitable as the tides. They’d spent many nights in the soothing waters after Bucky escaped the icy clutches of the hydra, letting Bucky soak in the heat. He’d spent a lot of time around the vents, too, but their warm lagoon also cocooned him in the safe memories of their childhood, of a time when things were peaceful, joyful, and carefree.

Steve, relieved of his duties for as long as Bucky needed him, had been beyond ecstatic just having his friend back. He hadn’t needed or expected anything more than the platonic relationship they’d shared; but one night, as they floated near the surface to admire the bright light of the full moon, Bucky had called his name.

When Steve turned, struck once again by Bucky’s beauty in the silvery light, Bucky had reached out with his good hand and pulled Steve into an unexpected, though thoroughly welcomed, kiss.

It hadn’t been the end of Bucky’s recovery, but it was hard to think of their time together since then as anything less than perfect.

“You remember this place?”

Bucky headbutted him in the back, deftly avoiding the dangerous tentacles there. “Like I could forget.”

“This is it.”

Hooking his chin over Steve’s shoulder from behind and fixing him with a sideways look, Bucky said, “Uh huh. That’s what I just said, ain’t it?”

“No, I mean, this is where I fell in love with you.”

“No way. You weren’t even mobile yet, just a tiny little anemone of a thing! I coulda fit you in the palm of my hand. Friends, yeah, but I was just a pup and you were—you were a baby, Steve.”

Steve’s tentacles curled around Bucky’s head and neck, draped themselves over his shoulders. They let the mild current float them toward the center of the dormant volcanic crater that formed the mid-sea lagoon, lazy with contentment.

“I was young, but I knew what I wanted.” Steve rubbed his cheek against Bucky’s as best he could without his cap getting in the way. “It’s all right that you didn’t. I know I wasn’t much to look at, I don’t blame you for not thinking of me like that.”

“You were in love with me, I was in love with you. Why’d it take us all the gullcrap to actually do something about it?”

When Steve pulled away from Bucky’s arms, Bucky let him go with a soft, questioning noise. But Steve didn’t retract the tentacles caressing his lover, because all he did was turn so they were facing each other again. “Young, stupid, scared,” he said, punctuating each excuse with an apologetically lingering kiss.

Bucky tried to answer once Steve stopped kissing him, but one of the more courageous tentacles took over the job Steve’s mouth had abandoned. Its first touch was delicate, just a brush off its tip across Bucky’s lower lip. Chuckling, Bucky returned the affection with a closed-mouth peck. That only served to embolden the tactile tendril, which pushed against his pursed lips and, when he parted them, slipped in to curl around his tongue like a kiss.

Licking and sucking, Bucky responded with equal enthusiasm and like that the conversation was over. Steve didn’t try to fight his arousal, just raised another tentacle to Bucky’s lips where he let it in with a happy sigh. Bucky’s fingers tightened around the tentacles that ventured out to encircle his wrists. The exceptional strength of his prosthetic hand would’ve left bruises on Steve’s fleshy parts, but his jelly just squished and molded to the grip, undamaged.

With hands and tentacles alike, Steve covered the soft skin of Bucky’s chest with touches. He trailed curled tips down Bucky’s sides and circled his thumbs over the pert nipples, earning a gasp. Bucky groaned around Steve’s tentacles and sucked them deeper, until Steve felt them passing the back of Bucky’s mouth and slipping into his throat. His tongue never stopped working, rubbing underneath the length of Steve’s tentacles still in his mouth.

It was hot as a thermal vent around the tentacles Bucky sucked. He ran warmer than Steve on the whole, his solid and blood-filled tail better at creating and conserving heat than Steve’s many tentacles, but even knowing that, Steve hadn’t been prepared for the feeling the first time a part of him eased inside Bucky. And no matter how many times it happened—hopefully many; he was counting on the rest of their lives—he’d never grow tired or bored of the sensation.

Steve’s pulse throbbed in his veins, along his tentacles, pounding through him like waves. Softer this time, Bucky moved his hands to the protruding lengths of the tentacles and stroked them in his fists. Sperm started to gather at the base of the tentacles and Steve couldn’t hold back, didn’t try to. He fucked his tentacles through Bucky’s grip and Bucky relaxed his tongue and throat, letting Steve thrust at will. In and out and in again, slipping slick through Bucky’s mouth.

Though it took enough concentration that he wasn’t sure he could accomplish it until he did, Steve switched up his tempo, moving his tentacles against each other instead of in tandem. It was so worth the effort, for how they rubbed against one another on the way, a wet glide of pressure and pleasure. Bucky gagged and his throat spasmed for a moment, until he adjusted to the new kind of intrusion. One or the other of Steve’s tentacles kept him full all the time, and he had to flare his gills at precisely the right moment or lose his chance to breathe for another round.

Bucky’s hands fell away as Steve increased his pace again. By then, Steve’s other tentacles had Bucky wrapped thoroughly, coiling around multiple points of his arms, torso, and tail. They weren’t restraining holds; it was just that the same constant need for contact grew so much more intense when they were making love. Being inside Bucky slaked his lust, but didn’t quench it. Not when he had so many other tendrils that could stretch out and connect with Bucky’s flesh.

Bucky reached for Steve and Steve reached back, weaving their fingers together in the last moment before his climax. As it hit him, he squeezed Bucky’s hands in warning and shoved both tentacles in as far as Bucky could take them. He came inside that beautiful, slick heat, tentacles throbbing as they sent wave after wave shooting down Bucky’s throat.

When Bucky started to tense up and his gills started to twitch violently with a need for oxygen they weren’t getting, Steve pulled most of the way out and finished in Bucky’s mouth as Bucky got his breath back. His whole body tingled as he came down from the high of it, like the time Natasha had shocked him during a sparring match. Every part of him was electrified and alive, extra sensitive and acutely aware of all the places he was touching Bucky.

And of where he wasn’t.

No sooner had his tentacles slipped fully out of Bucky’s mouth than Bucky was licking his lips clean and urging, “Touch me, Steve, come on, let me feel you.”

Since Steve had come and Bucky hadn’t, he knew exactly what Bucky was asking for. But he and Bucky were touching in so many places, it was tempting to play dumb and tell Bucky he could already feel him. Make Bucky beg for what he wanted in graphic detail. Bucky’s talk got dirtier and dirtier as he got all desperate and bothered. It was a turn-on for both of them, but in the celebratory spirit of the day, Steve decided to be kind.

With the two tentacles he’d freed from Bucky’s lips, still tender from the attention paid to them and the orgasm that had crashed through them, he formed a coiled tunnel around the claspers that grew out of Bucky’s pelvic fins. Bucky groaned contentedly as he slid himself into Steve’s grip.

Steve didn’t have anything for Bucky to penetrate except his mouth. They did it like that sometimes, but between Steve’s cap getting in the way and the size of Bucky’s claspers,he could only fit part of one in his mouth. It got Bucky off just fine, but it didn’t drive him crazy the way having Steve wrapped all around him did.

So Steve wound himself around Bucky’s claspers, tightly enough for him to feel the pressure but loosely enough that Bucky could move in his grasp. Move Bucky did, quickly ramping up from tentative pushes to hard, fast thrusts as his claspers rubbed against each other and against Steve’s coil of tentacles.

Bucky’s teeth gnashed against the scutes of his armored forearm, the only thing that could stand up to his instinctive need to sink his teeth into flesh when the stimulation to his claspers got overwhelming. Though Steve could heal and even regrow bits of himself if Bucky lost control to his baser reflexes, they’d learned very early on that it was best for Steve’s tentacles to be well away from Bucky’s mouth when it was time for Bucky to come.

Bucky’s chest, on the other hand, was a perfect place for them. Steve may not have had much to offer in the way of biting during sex, but his cnidoblasts packed a wallop even through Bucky’s tough skin. Because Bucky liked pain with his sex. Needed it.

It might’ve been a shark thing, like the biting, or it might’ve just been a Bucky thing. Steve would probably never know. He wasn’t about to ask Thor, because he didn’t want to know that sort of detail about Thor—nor all the other information he was bound to overshare as soon as invited—and also because it didn’t matter.

He didn’t care about other sharks. There was never gonna be another shark for him. All he wanted to do was make Bucky feel good, and according to Bucky, Steve’s sting felt amazing in the throes of passion.

As Bucky rutted into the coil of Steve’s harmless tentacles, Steve brought the vicious ones around. Dark red, with flared tissues at the end that fluttered prettily in the current and belied the power of his stinging nematocysts, they were deadly under the right circumstances. He’d wielded them in the war against countless hydra and kraken enemies, but he liked this use better. He loved this use, in truth. He didn’t enjoy killing, even though his body was made for it; but like this, careful not to overdo the toxicity, he could use it as a tool for Bucky’s pleasure instead.

The gray roughness of Bucky’s scales gave way to soft pink flesh at his abdomen and chest, just as Steve’s translucent jelly did. Bucky’s chest skin didn’t have the same level of protection as his tail, but it was still thicker than most others’ and could withstand more physical damage than even Steve, though Steve healed faster. It meant that less of Steve’s potentially fatal venom got through, so while a sting or two—or three or four, when Bucky was really in the mood—would get Bucky off and leave painful welts, they didn’t risk permanent damage.

Bucky was getting desperate. His teeth gnawing against his own wrist didn’t provide him the same leverage and hold that clamping his jaws around a partner would, so his thrusts started out erratic and only grew less controlled as his claspers slid through Steve’s grip.

It was no time at all before he was begging, “Fuck, Steve. Stevie, please, c’mon. Give it to me. I need—Fuck! Oh fuck, Steve.”

Tightening his hold on Bucky so hard it was bound to bruise meant his lover’s needy rutting turned into a hopeless wiggle as Bucky tried to keep pushing himself into the channel Steve had so lovingly provided. But with his tail pinned in three places and his torso, arms, and fins all equally wrapped, firmly under Steve’s control, he could barely move. Only his head was free, so he could duck and bob to keep water flushing breath through his gills. Not that he remembered to do that, except when he needed it to plead with Steve.

Once he was sure Bucky couldn’t thrash himself into harm’s way, Steve gave him what he needed. He pulled the coil of his tentacles away from Bucky’s claspers, then returned them as two individuals, one to wrap around each clasper and curl and stroke and undulate. Bucky went taught in his grasp, shaking, pleas falling away to wordless moans and gasps as Steve spiraled his ecstasy ever higher.

Bucky was close, close enough that maybe he could come without the pain, but Steve wasn’t about to deny him.

The first touch of Steve’s stinging tentacle, pressed so very lightly to the small of Bucky’s back just above the transition to his tougher tail skin, made Bucky yelp and writhe. Thanks to Steve’s hold, his efforts didn’t get him any further from or closer to the source; Steve couldn’t tell which way Bucky was trying to move, but he had a pretty good idea.

Bucky confirmed it when his muscles lost some of their tension and his voice came out shaky but sure as he told Steve, “More.”

This time he gave Bucky’s stomach a brush, the flesh there even more sensitive than Bucky’s back and the reaction proportionate. He shuddered in place and his claspers throbbed in Steve’s tentacles, but he didn’t come yet. Before he could recover from the hit, Steve redoubled the stimulation to Bucky’s claspers and brought his whole tentacle up to slap Bucky on the chest. Stinging cnidoblasts caught him across both nipples and he screamed in agony and ecstasy at once.

Bucky’s whole body locked up as his claspers emptied themselves into the sea. The force of it rushed by Steve like a geyser, and though he pulled his stinging tentacle back to safety, he kept working Bucky with the smaller ones until the flow of his climax ceased.

Then Steve’s restraining hold turned into a supportive one when Bucky sagged in his grip. He would’ve sunk down to the floor of the caldera without Steve holding him up, spent from orgasm and half drowned from not breathing properly for the last few minutes. Steve, used to Bucky’s post-coital exhaustion, gently turned his lover so that Bucky’s back was cradled against his chest. Wrapping arms and tentacles around Bucky in a swaddling embrace, Steve held him close and propelled them in circles so the water would flow through Bucky’s gills like he needed it to.

As Bucky came back up into himself, breath steadying and tail swishing from side to side to help them along, he showed no signs of wanting to extract himself from Steve. He did turn his head slightly, though, and butted his face against Steve’s collar bone.

“I love you, Buck,” Steve murmured to the top of his head. “Happy anniversary.”

Bucky mouthed at his chest, teeth prickling Steve without biting down. “You too, Stevie.”

They floated lazily in the tranquil lagoon through the afternoon and into evening, as the clear blue water darkened to black.

**Author's Note:**

> [I exist (and sometimes even post) on tumblr!](http://alxdiamond.tumblr.com/) Come say hi if you'd like.


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